Victorious Living
Every day, we face a myriad of choices. They flash and jump and shout in front of us, vying for the important result of our decision. With competing agendas, the hope is to influence us to choose a perspective that benefits the parties involved.
We hear all the time the importance of priorities. Organizing what we are to do into what is most important and what is least. This sounds a lot easier than it is. The main issue with organizing what to do is we do not truly know who we are.
Pick me!
Like the cereal aisle in the grocery store, we can be overwhelmed by the competing choices presented to us. Product advertisements, peer pressure, institutional suggestion, the flesh, the Spirit, the powers of darkness – all have a lobbyist whispering into our ear.
What are they competing for? What is the prize? The trophy is our perspective. But the real prize is our allegiance. They win a convert into their way of thinking, believing, and behaving.
Somewhere in the midst of this is our true and unique self, crying out to be heard. It sometimes feels like who we truly are is buried under a pile of debris!
How to Choose
We choose a perspective whether we realize we are doing so or not. In the chorus of voices, we allow one to rise to the top. It could be we have been choosing the same perspective for so long that we don’t even recognize it is a choice. It just feels like the way things are. We have cast our allegiance to one influencer or another and it is hard to conceive of anything different.
We run to the opposite spectrum too. We’re afraid to commit to anything, making different and inconsistent choices in an attempt to find something that sticks, some semblance of satisfaction.
Our choices are influenced by our sense of values. What matters to us determines how we think, believe, and behave.
When we do not have a sense of our values, we adopt whatever sounds good for a particular situation or season. Without a deep and accurate knowledge of what matters to us, how are we supposed to sift through the options and prioritize?
We make our best choices by naming our deepest values. Knowing these helps determine the flow of our decisions. We adopt a perspective based on what we perceive to be true, important, and valuable in our self and in the world at large.
Rise To The Top
The perspective we choose is one of only three things we can control. The essence of self-awareness is to be aware of our choices and understand their consequences.
Competing perspectives will do all they can to convince us that their values are our values. And one of them may be right. But the only way for us to find the peace we long for, the joy we crave, and the consistency needed to build a healthy life is to discover our values and name them.
We always choose the option that most addresses our values. It may threaten them or promote them, but those unconscious choices are a result of the values we perceive within ourselves. They can be “true” values or borrowed ones. But what we value is the starting point for making choices, adopting a perspective, and organizing priorities.
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